Tip o’ the Week 331 – OneNote Clipper Edge Extension

Ever since the Edge browser appeared with Windows 10, there have been calls from some quarters to allow extensions of some kind – ad blocking, the main one, though the practice of blocking ads in web pages is turning into a pitched battle between content owners and readers. Oh, and the advertisers too.

With the latest versions of Edge that are available to Windows Insiders, and due to be generally released with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on July 29th, it’s now possible to try out some preview extensions (including a couple of ad blockers – though be careful, don’t use more than one at a time or you might cross the streams).

See the list of preview extensions here, noting the minimum version of Windows you need to be running to use them (try pressing WindowsKey+R and entering winver to see what you’re currently using).

One extension in preview is a version of the OneNote Web Clipper application, which allows for a simple button to be added to the Edge toolbar, making it a quick click to grab the current web page and save it into OneNote. View more about the extension here.

If you’re not yet on the right version of Windows, there are other ways to save web pages into your OneNote notebook…

Edge – if you click on the Web Note icon on the Edge toolbar, the intent is that you can annotate web pages (eg. with your stylus if you have one), and you can then save the annotated page to OneNote. You could skip the “annotating” bit and just go straight to the “saving”.

Print – you could just print from any application to OneNote, using the installed dummy printer driver that sends a copy of your app/page/doc to a new page in OneNote instead of physically printing.

Snip on your own – the desktop version of OneNote will let you capture an area of the screen by pressing WindowsKey+SHIFT+S – grab that, paste it manually into OneNote or set it to go straight there – look in the Desktop OneNote under File | Options | Send to OneNote and you can set the default behaviour.

Anyway, get into the habit of saving stuff from your browser into OneNote and you’ll wonder how you managed to run your life beforehand.